"She made up her mind while standing on the street of Dayton."

Dolen Perkins-Valdez, author of Wench.

I returned the students' midterms yesterday and was happy to see how well some of them engaged ideas like "identity" and "resistance" in their short writings (they had a choice between writing a poem or an essay in addition to answering multiple choice questions). The issue of identity certainly figured into our look at the ways in which "blackness" is appropriated via music  as seen in the movie The Commitments. This motion picture concerns a group of Dubliners who form a band that plays hits made famous by African American artists during the 1950s and 1960s. After the movie, we saw the beginnings of a heated discussion on whether we are persuaded that the Irish, as the movie suggests, are the "blacks" of Europe. 

One of the more provocative observations came from a student who commented that Mexicans seem to be the "blacks" of Latin America. That comment and others stated in class or via written reflections that I read later pushed my own thinking about race as a social construction. Moreover, like some of the students who indicated as much via their written reflections, I remain quite interested in how the urban space expands the possibilities of understanding how race appears (and disappears) whenever other issues like ethnicity, poverty and labor are before us. 

To be clear, Dublin is very much a city and while watching the movie yesterday, the grime and poverty we tend to see in America's inner cities, which are heavily-populated by people of African descent, it was hard to not see what message Alan Parker, the filmmaker was trying to send. Whether we are persuaded by his story or not, it was a good discussion that sets us up to return to the idea of race and space next week. We will look at excerpts from Yael Sternhell's study of how southern people - black and white, enslaved and not - were forced to make sense of the world around them simply because they had to move through space amid the upheaval surrounding the Civil War. Their experiences pose unique tensions with an excerpt from Wench, a work of fiction by Dolen Perkins-Valdez. In an excerpt from that novel, we will learn about four enslaved women who traveled to a city away from the direct oversight of their masters. How does the urban space inform their impressions of their oppression? How does the opportunity to simply be mobile make them aware of the possibility of freedom? We will try to think about possible answers to these questions while keeping race and gender squarely before us.